Way Past Pleasant: A Guide to Psychedelic Folk

From its beginnings in the late '60s to today, psychedelic folk has aimed to absorb, acknowledge, and update the past while meeting modern needs. Grayson Haver Currin picks some of the genre's best tracks from across the last 50 years.

British folk great Bert Jansch never really stopped making records during his half-century career, always testing the boundaries of pastoral folk with carefully considered parts that pushed beyond mere pleasantries. Still, when a cadre of young musicians connected with Jansch for his 2006 album The Black Swan, the moment felt like an instant renaissance. Many from that collaborative group, including Devendra Banhart and producer Noah Georgeson, had inched into popular favor as part of a trend loosely termed “freak-folk” or “New Weird America.” And with the collaborative record, they were doing what their music had tacitly done all along—announcing Jansch and a regimen of related pickers, balladeers, singers, and dreamers as clear stylistic antecedents.

That concept of absorbing, acknowledging, and updating the past serves as a constant through most folk music, no matter the culture or society in which it thrives. Whether via the oral traditions that Harry Smith, Alan Lomax, and their ilk eventually captured, or the Grateful Dead’s ability to turn countless listeners onto old traditional numbers, folk music functions best when it uses the past to feed the present and inspire the future.

The term “psychedelic folk,” then, represents those most progressive edges, when an old idea gets a new twist, whether it’s an electric guitar slicing through a standard or a coffee-shop singer adding prurient images of necrophilia to open-tuned beauties. Psychedelic folk is a perpetually self-expanding term, too, where each successive experiment widens its reach but loosens its grip.

It has infiltrated the mainstream thanks to acts like the Byrds, the Rolling Stones, the Band, as well as the enchanting work of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. It has folded in the extremely obscure through the improvisational risks of Michael Cooper and Dredd Foole. And it has often lurked in pockets of near-anonymity, where overlooked records by Lal and Mike Waterson or Gary Higgins languished only to be discovered and championed by younger musicians decades later. And it has bloomed internationally, spreading far away from the British Isles and the Americas.

Above all, though, psychedelic folk has inherited the basics and turned them in unexpected ways, aiming not to be content with the past but instead intent on repurposing it for modern needs.

Karen Dalton

“Are You Leaving for the Country?”

1971

The last song on the last album that the tragic and captivating singer Karen Dalton released before she died two decades later, “Are You Leaving for the Country?” lingers now as a thesis statement for the idea of psychedelic folk. In the best sense possible, Dalton was a freak, with a voice that curled like that of some backwoods jazz prodigy and a guitar style that echoed Wes Montgomery and Chet Atkins. On this song, she uses both to dream of emancipation from the rush of city life, the rigors of social expectations, and the restrictions of timely trends. “Do you feel like something's not real?” she asks. “Let the spirit move you again.” This song is that very spirit.

Cul de Sac

“Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California”

1991

A quarter-century after Boston’s Cul de Sac debuted with Ecim, the band’s guitarist, Glenn Jones, is now known as a preeminent scholar of John Fahey’s music. (See his excellent work for the box set Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You.) In 1991, Cul de Sac made those roots clear even as they wrestled with them on a half-reverent, half-revisionist cover of Fahey’s “Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California”. The quartet twists and lilts like the original, but they add shocks of noise and layers of mystery to the interpretation, too. Fahey bent folk and country forms to his will; Cul de Sac took one of his strange shapes and sailed skyward with it.

Devendra Banhart

“A Sight to Behold”

2004

The anthem of Devendra Banhart’s breakthrough album Rejoicing in the Hands, “A Sight to Behold” discovers the singer connecting his idiosyncratic vision—in 2004, positioned at the most popular edge of the freak-folk scene—to a larger tradition and narrative. In the first two verses, he treats creativity as a precious burden and gift, where an individual must shape and exude ideas in withering solitude. But in the final verse, he realizes he’s got company and context, that this moment is “like finding home in an old folk song.”

Mirel Wagner

“No Death”

2012

Born in Ethiopia and reared in Finland, Mirel Wagner masters the international concept of morbid folk ballads on “No Death”. During this love song lined with tragedy, Wagner first describes her paramour’s corpse—rotten tongue, stiff limbs, swollen face and all. But that forestalls neither her devotion nor attraction, delivered with the temperance of a lullaby and an air of eternal seduction. “I move my hips, in her I am home/ I will keep on loving, ‘til the marrow dries from her bones,” sings Wagner, who somehow turns necrophilia into venerable devotion.

Sandy Denny

“Bushes and Briars”

1972

Between stints with Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny cut a pair of excellent solo LPs that suggested her unapologetic approach to folk re-contextualization did not require a bigger band. To wit, “Bushes and Briars”, from 1972’s excellent Sandy, swipes the name of a halcyon British traditional and offers up several ghastly, possibly heretic images over a country-rock clatter, all led by Richard Thompson’s incisive electric guitar. She walks through a graveyard to question the weather, her mortality and her country’s chosen religion as the wind blows cold. “The sound of music, it comes to me from every place I go,” Denny sings, offering up one creed meant to fend off the rest.

Hiss Golden Messenger

“Jesus Shot Me in the Head”

2012

“Jesus Shot Me in the Head” emerges from the sound of a thunderstorm, the sound setting the scene for a spiritual dirge in which the protagonist never beats back his real-world problems but hopes for something better in the afterlife. His voice traced by a beat that marches as if to the gallows, Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor pronounces his problems in a deadpan delivery. Folk music has long been a vehicle for suffering the world and questioning the point. Taylor does both at once against an ominous backdrop, suggesting these worries actually know no end.

Vashti Bunyan

“I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind”

1967

During the first phase of her career, soft-voiced English songwriter Vashti Bunyan released one album, 1970’s exquisite and sentimental masterpiece Just Another Diamond Day. But she never offered one of her best tracks, “I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind”, until that record’s reissue 30 years later. Backed by elliptical electrical guitar and bittersweet harmonica, Bunyan delivers a surrealistic confession to her sweetie, saying she’d like to analyze (and possibly improve) him by being surrounded by his thoughts. In the end, though, she chooses not to tamper with his mind but instead to bask “in the sun of things I like about you.” Only in her 20s, Bunyan captured the essence of successful relationship forbearance.

Pelt

“Calais to Dover”

2006

One long-standing tenet of folk music involves the ability of a song to move between sources, to be shared and reinterpreted by a string of performers. Jack Rose originally cut “Calais to Dover” for his 2005 solo LP, Kensington Blues. Two months after its release, though, his acoustic drone ensemble Pelt reconfigured it as an engrossing 21-minute wonder at New York’s Knitting Factory. Between Mike Gangloff’s slow-motion fiddle sweeps and Rose’s own hyper-kinetic guitar runs, it’s an absorbing merger of Indian and Appalachian folk interests, like a raga delivered on the back porch.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

“God is Alive, Magic is Afoot”

1969

In 1969, Buffy Sainte-Marie used her recent star power as a plaintive Canadian folk singer to take a pioneering chance and stretch her acoustic numbers with electronics rather than a simple backing band. Though the strange Illuminations flopped upon release, its mix of the organic and inorganic proved prescient. Written by Leonard Cohen, opener “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot” is very much a folk song, its gentle guitar part tracing a call for human empowerment beyond any one deity or belief system. But Sainte-Marie’s voice is granulated and refracted; she sounds like a mirror of herself, giving her plea a strange and alluring power.

Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice

“Spear of Destiny”

2005

Wooden Wand (aka James Jackson Toth) and the Vanishing Voice's Jessica Bowen were two principal enablers of what became, rather reductively, New Weird America. With a wide network of collaborators, the couple made some of the most open-ended records of that strange, mid-2000s moment, using roots forms as the basis for vivid experiments. “Spear of Destiny” epitomizes their approach. Together, they bend a basic blues structure and Bowen’s pastoral images of mountains and springs with a second guitar washed in acid and an overall atmosphere of eerie premonition. This song seems to stare out from behind a cloak of sylvan camouflage.

Bobby Charles

“All the Money”

1972

Backed by pieces of the Band and Dr. John, Louisiana songwriter Bobby Charles reflected his region on his brilliant 1972 debut. He folded R&B, jazz, country, and rock into most every song, and “All the Money” is a classic working person’s folk lament, where the powerless ask no one in particular for a little help while expecting none. The lazy shuffle of the drums and the sighs of the reeds suggest some late-afternoon jam in a stiflingly humid barn, where the feeling of small-time desperation is shared like faith.

Pentangle

“Lord Franklin”

1970

By the time the British folk constellation Pentangle got to “Lord Franklin” for their 1970 LP Cruel Sister, the tune had been around for more than a century and even served as the framework for “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a few years earlier. But Pentangle added flourishes to the tale of nautical woe that still feel modern. Bert Jansch’s concertina line stretches beneath John Renbourn’s carefully rendered narrative, underscoring the tune’s mournful quality along with Jacqui McShee’s wordless wail. Most surprising of all, though, is Renbourn’s screaming electric solos, which add an unabashed rock flair to this aged fare.

Six Organs of Admittance

“The Six Stations”

2004

As Six Organs of Admittance, Ben Chasny has contributed a bevy of incredible songs to this field, all pairing his articulate acoustic guitar phrases with a modest, approachable voice. Chasny doesn’t really sing on this sidelong saga, but his playing does move between tender, syncopated blues and restive knots, as though conjuring John Fahey and Bert Jansch in the same sitting. What’s more, it connects him to an extended esoteric lineage, as Current 93 leader and freak-folk impresario David Tibet recites a bucolic poem in the middle. This feels like a demented fever dream, somehow strange and soothing.

Terry Callier

“Occasional Rain”

1972

The title of Terry Callier’s late ‘60s debut, The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier, was a bit of a feint. Though he played six-string guitar and sang plainly, there was always some soul to the Chicago singer’s songs. (See, for his instance, his velveteen take on “Cotton Eyed Joe”.) By the end of the ‘70s, though, he’d fully embraced R&B, funk, and even disco, a long step from those meager beginnings. His 1972 album Occasional Rain—and, in particular, its beguiling title track—represent the best possible nexus of those phases. Accompanied by an acoustic guitar that suggests rain scattering on a tin roof and electric effects that bring sudden gusts, Callier forgoes rhythm for the blues as he searches for brighter horizons. In an instant, he located a hidden border between the seemingly disconnected spheres of psychedelic soul and folk in a way that few have since.

Incredible String Band

“The Half-Remarkable Question”

1968

About one minute into “The Half-Remarkable Question”, the guitar chords ease into a canter, the sitar line stretches slightly, and Robin Williamson’s voice turns skyward: “It’s the old forgotten question,” he sings. “What is it that we are a part of? And what is it that we are?” With their interest in incorporating far-flung ideas and instruments into their disjointed song structures and addressing the major topics and ideologies of the world, the Incredible String Band spent a rather incredible decade attempting to tease out individual answers to such queries. In many ways, they still represent the very essence of psychedelic folk itself: They took the familiar to somewhere different with the goal of, eventually, making it familiar again.